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I think at the beginning of learning LA I would have benefited from a more broad introduction to the topic by explaining that it is the algebra of transformations, generally linear transformations, and also the art of quantifying those transformations in meaningful ways.

I would have benefited from some more handwaving in this regard (matrix multiplication, eigenvectors and eigenvalues) and less on the mechanics of the operations, before starting on the basic technicalities. But a “lesson” on these topics on day 0 is too soon


I agree, but people are very weary of these things because of the (correct) belief that their appropriation is guided by unaccountable bureaucrats. It stands in need of justification that Europeans feel they never got to hear

> but people are very weary of these things because of the (correct) belief that their appropriation is guided by unaccountable bureaucrats.

People believe this because every single member state is using EU institutions as a punching bag whenever they have issues locally. The people have no idea how the EU work, they only hear about it when used as a bogeyman


I don’t disagree with the general point here but the attraction of that argument has surely drifted much in ~5y.

I’d be REALLY curious to see a survey of philosophy 2015 vs 2025 UG entrants on mind-brain connection intuitions


I feel like it might be strengthened by a machine that actually does implement the core of the argument (even passes the turing test?) but is also just matrix multiplication. Previously the idea of a device that could respond to input with human-like output was a fantasy, now it's reality which removes one of the arguments against the Chinese Room on the basis of plausibility.

But yes, I would like to see a modern philosophers take on it.


I'm more interested in whether the uninformed intuitions have changed, whether someone who used an LLM before graduating from school and entering university has a more forgiving stance than an "ignorant" college entrant from ten years ago. From my experience of the field, I would really doubt many philosophers of mind have changed their view based on this. The major questions of interest concern qualia, it ha been so for many years.

Plausibility was never an argument against Searle's Chinese Room Argument ... that's a very deep confusion, since Searle was arguing against the possibility of Strong AI, whereas advocates of Strong AI of course thought it was plausible and that's why they were working to create it. That you conflate the Chinese Room Argument with "the Chinese Room" is one aspect of the confusion.

It’s absolutely about the plausibility of mechanistic intentionality, given the implausibility of intentionality where the person in the experiment doesn’t understand chinese

Searle's argument may well be about the plausibility of "mechanistic intentionalty", whatever exactly that means ("mechanistic" just sounds like bigotry to me ... we are all mechanisms and Searle didn't say otherwise, just that we are meat mechanisms and not purely syntactic mechanisms ... and his argument was intended as a logical proof, not just a plausibility argument), but that's not what the previous comments were about. Apparently you mechanistically see the word "plausibility" and think that any and all statements about it refer to the same thing.

I won't respond further.


There are arguments made specifically about the implausibility of such a room making the argument itself invalid. Or I guess I should say “we’re”, because that position is now much less tenable with LLMs.

We can’t meaningfully deny humans have qualia, there would be too much baby and not enough bathwater.

I would not deny it. The reason people accept current evidence is, after all, because they can relate to the experience of qualia, even if there's no complete objective understanding of it yet.

both are definitely used in modern British English, but whilst is strange to my ears as I grew up in Ireland

I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent trackers.

It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.

I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.


Gemini? Gopher, if you're old school? I also vaguely recall something called flask

there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages


I intended to explore it more as to say, this is my ideal, it used to be a lot more like it, now it is not, and further is less and less so.

I think overall, the pull and fun of the internet was in the content delivered; now the attractive forces are overwhelmingly rooted in the delivery.


As I said in another thread, visual hallucinations (without intoxication) are certainly a thing, but they are quite rarely associated with schizophrenia. There is far, far more to the condition than hallucinations or even psychosis more generally, but hallucinations are most commonly auditory

It’s not good for a doctor to be your best friend. It doesn’t seem any LLM is capable of that emotional distance.

WhatsApp is the “best” Meta app by far. It does just offer an easy, secure way of contacting people using their phone number, through text, voice, images, video.

None of their other apps come close. It doesn’t even look like a Meta product to me.


Meta acquired WhatsApp, thats why its the best

They acquired instagram too, and somehow they transformed that into the same sort of shithole as modern Facebook...

As the other user pointed out, it definitely stands out among other product acquisitions.

What makes WhatsApp superior to Telegram and/or Signal?

With lawyers like these, …

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